Main menu

Books

Canada hasn’t left undesirable days behind

Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru is a lavishly illustrated account of a key moment in our history. Author Ali Kazemi is a Toronto-based documentary filmmaker and an associate professor at York University.

Canada’s policy toward immigrants and refugees has been much in the news lately. A report from CIBC indicates that because of our aging workforce, “just to stabilize the ratio of working to non-working age population would require tripling the annual numbers of new arrivals for decades.” Meanwhile, recent gun violence in Toronto was quickly blamed on “foreign criminals” by Minister Jason Kenney and the vocal Martin Collacott of the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform.

Despite evidence that the individuals involved were mainly Canadian-born citizens, Collacott mused that Canada’s immigration and refugee policies were to blame and said “we may well have allowed them to come here when the odds were stacked against the likelihood of their children adapting successfully to Canadian society.” The upshot is that people from certain other countries — the non-white ones — are inherently more likely to commit crimes. According to Collacott, we should restrict their entry because even if the parents are law-abiding citizens, their children may become criminals.

This way of thinking is hardly new. Now is an opportune moment to reflect on our nation’s past policies toward immigrants, as we decide how to handle the impact of demographic changes on the economy.

Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru is a lavishly illustrated account of a key moment in our history. Author Ali Kazemi is a Toronto-based documentary filmmaker and an associate professor at York University.

In 1914, a ship carrying 376 South Asian passengers tried to dock in Vancouver. Canada was part of the British Empire at the time, and many of the passengers were Sikh veterans of the British Indian Army. They believed that as subjects of the empire, they could settle anywhere within it as legitimately as their white colleagues. British lawyers in India concurred.

The Canadian government had other ideas.

Despite an open-door policy for immigrants from Europe and 400,000 white arrivals in 1913, the South Asian migrants on the Komagata Maru were viewed as a threat. Canada was at pains to prevent Asian immigrants from arriving on its shores. The Chinese Head Tax was one policy intended to discourage this — and the “continuous journey” requirement was another.

Typically, migrants from India had to switch ships in Hong Kong on the journey to Canada; this became grounds for excluding them without bluntly saying so. When a zealous immigration official followed the policy to the letter and refused entry to Europeans, he was quickly reminded that “it is only intended to enforce it strictly against really undesirable immigrants.”

Behind the opaque language of Canada’s immigration policies was the conviction that people from certain countries were inferior. The official term was “unassimilable:” simply too different by virtue of race or religion to become part of Canadian society. While “White Canada” is a phrase that has disappeared, it was the driving goal of immigration policy until the 1960s, and motivated mass outbreaks of vigilante violence in Vancouver, during which the businesses of Chinese and Japanese residents were vandalized.

In their efforts to turn away the passengers of the Komagata Maru, immigration officers detained them illegally offshore, even depriving them of food and water until some — particularly children — fainted from thirst. Fearful that the Supreme Court would find their actions illegal, authorities denied the passengers proper access to legal counsel. When the case was finally heard by the B.C. Court of Appeal, Ottawa argued that since First Nations people were already subject to discrimination on the basis of race, Canada could apply this to restrict the entry of South Asian subjects of the empire as well. The judgment went the government’s way.

The case of the Komagata Maru was a significant moment in our history, but especially for Vancouver. Undesirables is full of images that bring the pre-First World War city to life. Rare glimpses of the earliest Sikh community are accompanied by photos of other visible minorities. Public sentiment is vividly captured through period cartoons, newspaper reprints and official memos. Author Kazemi brings a cinematic pace to the narrative, framed by larger questions of race and politics within the British Empire.

Nearly a century after the Komagata Maru was turned away, and despite decades of civic contributions from South Asian and Chinese arrivals, it is astonishing how quickly non-white immigration is invoked to explain domestic problems. The belief that ethnic identity predisposes people to certain types of behaviour stubbornly resists our self-image as a nation that takes equality seriously.

Eva Sajoo is a research associate with the Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures at Simon Fraser University. She has a graduate degree in International Development and Education from the University of London.

Lively discourse is the lifeblood of any healthy democracy and The Star encourages readers to engage in robust debates about our stories. But, please, avoid personal attacks and keep your comments respectful and relevant. If you encounter abusive comments, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. The Star is Using Facebook Comments. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

If you wear glasses, take them off. Dunk them in a puddle, shake ‘n’ bake them with some grit from the shoulder of the road, scrape away what you can with your glove, and then put them back on. That’s the view too many people believe is good enough to have through the windshield of their car.